The wrong man

Locking up the usual suspects is no way to fight terrorism

LOTFI RAISSI, a 27-year-old Algerian pilot, admits he is no angel. He has a conviction for theft and has acknowledged using a false identity card. But Mr Raissi, who has been in Belmarsh high-security jail since his arrest on terrorism charges last September, has, along with his French wife and his family, loudly protested his innocence. He now seems to have been vindicated.

On February 12th, Mr Raissi was freed on bail after lawyers representing the American government finally admitted that they had no evidence to support the claim that he was the lead instructor for the pilot who flew American Airlines flight 77 into the Pentagon on September 11th. The only charges now remaining against Mr Raissi are that he failed to declare either an old knee injury or his teenage conviction for theft on an application for an American pilot's licence. These charges are so minor that they are unlikely to lead to extradition. It looks rather as if they are being pursued only because it would be too embarrassing to drop them now.

When Mr Raissi appeared at Bow Street magistrates court in London at the end of September, the government's lawyers claimed that the FBI had evidence to show not just association with the suicide pilots but also evidence of “active conspiracy-proving correspondence and telecommunications”.

All the supposed evidence to substantiate this charge has crumbled. A key part of the case against Mr Raissi was the FBI's claim that it had video footage of him with Hani Hanjour, the pilot of the doomed plane. This turned out to consist of poor quality web-cam images of Mr Raissi with his cousin in his own flat. The FBI further claimed that Mr Raissi and Mr Hanjour had trained on the same aircraft. But, like the frequent telephone calls that are alleged to have taken place between the two men, no evidence for this has been produced that would stand up in court.

Mr Raissi's case raises several disturbing issues. Should a suspect be locked up in a high-security prison for more than five months to allow the FBI to try to substantiate its claims? Was the Crown Prosecution Service pressured into pursuing a case that was at best circumstantial? Finally, why did the courts take so long before deciding that Mr Raissi had no case to answer when intelligence officers on both sides of the Atlantic acknowledged privately that the evidence against him was tenuous? The pressures on both the British and American law enforcement agencies after the September 11th attacks were enormous. But that cannot provide an excuse for locking up “the usual suspects”, for five months.